The Gaslight Theater in downtown Durango was abuzz last week with lively discussion about energy generation, transmission and storage in a wide-ranging conversation with La Plata Electric Association officials and customers.
Mingling over bags of popcorn, they talked energy prices and power generation methods during LPEA’s CommunityPowerX night, an event focused on increasing community engagement and offering education between the utility provider and the people who invest in it.
For members Ryan and Lori Keck, it was a fun event that made powering their home a little less mystifying.
“We've gotten our power from LPEA the whole time we've lived here,” said Lori Keck, adding they moved here six years ago. “It’s great being in a co-op. It is really interesting and different to have people ask you questions and look for your feedback and invite you to their meetings.”
The future of the utility company was at the forefront of the evening. In addition to giving space for dialogue, three speakers gave presentations about the work underway at the co-op, including three presentations about incorporating hydroelectricity, increased battery storage and regional power grids into LPEA.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” LPEA CFO Patrick Berry said. “It builds community, and it’s an opportunity for communication so folks get facts straight. It also helps us get feedback from the community and members that helps guide strategy.”
Katie Guerry, senior vice president of Regulatory and Government Affairs for Convergent Energy and Power, flew all the way from Philadelphia to Durango because she gets more excited about batteries than most people do, she said during her presentation. The reason, she explained, is because increasing energy storage is going to play a crucial role for the future of U.S. progress.
Guerry has been in the power game for over 20 years. For all that time, storing energy has been a million-dollar question. Luckily, she said, battery technology has advanced enough that storing energy for commercial use is easier, cheaper and more efficient now.
“If I had a nickel for every time a colleague said, ‘I wish we had a way to store energy like how we store every other commodity ...” Guerry said. “But it’s not a what-if anymore.”
Guerry said the demand for electricity has risen dramatically in the U.S., and is expected to continue rising. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association predicts that in the next 25 years, energy demand will rise by 50%. ICF International’s prediction calls for an even more drastic rise – as much as 25% by 2030 and 78% by 2050.
Some of the main drivers behind the hunger for energy are data centers that house cloud services and artificial intelligence, like those being built by Google, Meta and Amazon. Though AI has been in the headlines lately, Guerry said, people forget to talk about cloud storage, which also relies on data centers.
“We need a lot of power, and we need it soon,” Guerry said.
She said there are several roadblocks. Aging infrastructure and the rising costs of building new power plants are putting existing power sources under strain. Already, she said, power reserves are going down, and energy shortages may become an issue across the country.
There is a solution, Guerry said: increasing energy storage – which is where batteries come into play.
“Battery energy storage solves for many problems that other parts of the grid can’t,” Guerry said.
Simply put, increasing the storage capability of the grid allows utility providers to stock up on power when demand is low that can be used later when demand is high. As the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewables like solar and wind power, which only produce energy when the sun shines or the wind blows, batteries can store energy for when those utilities are not producing.
Another upside, Guerry said, is that batteries store energy regardless of where it comes from.
“I like to say batteries are purple,” Guerry said. “We like to store electrons regardless of the fuel systems they come from.”
More battery storage means less energy is wasted, Guerry explained. In turn, less money is wasted on generating power that is not used. That saves everyone money and makes the grid more reliable, she said.
LPEA is working with Convergent to deploy a battery storage system at the Shenandoah substation outside of Durango. The system was funded by a $2 million grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, and will be able to hold 20 megawatt-hours of energy in reserve that can power 2,800 homes in the area for several hours any part of the year, according to LPEA.
HydroWest CEO Sam Perry’s great-great-grandfather, D.R.C. Brown, brought hydropower to Colorado when, in 1885, he made Aspen the first city west of the Mississippi River to be powered by electricity.
About 140 years later, and Brown’s descendent is still using water to power the world at the Vallecito Hydroelectric Facility on the Los Pinos River – which LPEA recently signed a 10-year deal with to buy enough power from to energize 2,500 homes in its service area, according to LPEA.
Perry’s family has learned a thing or two about the promises of using water to create electricity – particularly as the world looks for more ways to generate power. Essentially, Perry said during his presentation, water is hyper-condensed solar energy.
“It’s like concentrated juice,” he said.
At first glance, Perry’s assertion seems counter-intuitive. But it all comes down to the water cycle, he said. Perry cited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that 173,000 terawatts of energy created by the sun hits the earth continuously – more than 10,000 times more than all the energy humanity uses.
Perry said a large part of that energy drives the water cycle. The sun evaporates water off the ocean, which then forms clouds, moves across continents and falls as rain when it runs into mountain ranges. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed – only transformed. A huge part of the solar energy that hits Earth is stored in water, which can then be used by people.
“Hydro is a giant, continuous form of solar power,” Perry said.
Durango lies at the feet of the San Juan Mountains and is a perfect place to harvest some of that energy-abundant hydropower, Perry said. Colorado is where this technology was mastered by his ancestor, after all.
Just as in Brown’s time, Perry said the country needs a reliable supply of power.
“The electrical system needs more than just electrons, it needs stability,” Perry said. “This is where hydropower shines.”
Unlike solar and wind, hydropower can create electricity continuously. Perry mentioned the recent flooding in Vallecito, when the sun did not shine for three days but an enormous amount of water was flowing through the turbines of the Vallecito hydro plant. Hydro can compliment other clean energy by providing consistent energy, making the grid even more reliable during extreme weather events and outages.
Carrie Simpson, vice president of markets for Southwest Power Pool, a nonprofit regional transmission organization that makes sure power is delivered to utility providers across several states, compared power transmission to an operator on an old-school phone line. If a community needs power, people at SPP work with utility providers and infrastructure owners to get it there from a power plant.
Simpson said there are three major power grids in the country: the Western Interconnect, the Eastern Interconnect and the Texas grid. And according to Hansen, Southwest Colorado has historically been isolated from major grids.
But, on April 1, LPEA will join SPP. That will allow the co-op to give and take power from other utilities across SPP’s service range.
Simpson explained that a provider in one part of the country may need power due to a natural disaster or a major weather event that knocks out their generation plants.
Because they are hooked up to a regional grid, they can access power created in another place – sometimes states away – making power supply more reliable than in the past. SPP makes sure that the power gets to where it needs to go, just like an old-school phone operator, she said.
In effect, LPEA will pay into a broader regional power grid spanning across Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. In theory, she said, LPEA could source power from providers in any one of those states when it needs it, and vice versa.
“We ask who needs power where,” Simpson said. “Then we move unneeded power where it’s needed, and we pay the utility for that.”
Joining a regional transmission organization like SPP lowers costs for all of the participating entities, Simpson said, because power generation costs are being pooled by everyone in the organization, in addition to making the grid more reliable.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
